AtheroSim: Atherosclerosis process simulator on smart devices

Atherosclerosis is the major cause of heart attacks, some strokes, aneurysms, and peripheral artery disease. Arteries are a well organized system: it provides the organs and tissues of the body with the blood needed to extract sufficient amounts of nutrients and oxygen. However, today, we are exposed to high levels of potentially toxic lipids and other factors. This may lead to the development of inflammation, scarring and disruption of the tunica intima, of which the sub-endothelial layer is initially affected in the process of atherogenesis. For these reasons, any increased awareness of potential atherosclerosis risk is a great improvement over current healthcare. We present iAtheroSim, an iOS application easy to use and freely available on the Apple Store. It allows the general public an easy way to access to the SimAthero simulator, which predicts atherogenesis risks taking into account some personal biophysiological indicators. This, at least, may convince people to schedule a medical doctor appointment in order to better evaluate the atherogenesis risk and to take counter- measures before that the disease process could cause severe complications. This is one of the first example in which it is showed that modern biological approaches based on computational modeling could reach the general public by means of extremely diffused architectures like smart- phones.